I have a thing for ferns. And ever since first-year botany class, I’ve had a thing for life cycles of lower plants. Obscure and unnecessarily geeky, you say? Well, this week, fellow friend-of-the-lower-plant, Jennifer Frazer, who is travelling through the fernstravaganza that is my homeland, has helped me reclaim a bit of my cool by using the following metaphor to describe the fern gametophyte form:

“It happens on a completely separate plant that is also a fern, but looks nothing like a fern you would recognize. A secret ninja fern.”

Weirdly, this is the second time in the past week that gametophytes have had some badass PR. DrRubidium wrote a post at io9 describing a teaching aid for the plant life cycle that casts the sporophyte as the facehugger stage of the Alien life cycle, and the gametophyte as the chestbursting alien form. Now I have an image of ninja gametophytes bursting out of someone’s chest.

Pulitzer-prize winning uber-science writer Deborah Blum doesn’t mind laying the smackdown on double-Pulitzer-winning journalist Nicholas Kristof, even though she admires his social justice work. That’s because Kristof is going through a sloppily-expressed chemophobic phase.

“If I didn’t believe we actually need smarter, more thoughtful regulation of toxic compounds, I wouldn’t find Kristof on chemicals so annoying.”

Jon Wilkins thinks that bad science reporting is like a zombie. The case study is a pretty awful video commentary on a 2008 paper about the genes that affect the blue eye phenotype, which comes out as “OMG blue-eyes, you are all descended from a common ancestor! ” Jon goes to the trouble of (snarkily) explaining exactly what the research does say, what it doesn’t, and reminds us that:

“Not only are we all related, we are all related over and over and over again.”

Picking an Ed Yong post as an editor’s pick is a bit like stating the extremely bloody obvious–I may as well just issue a blanket recommendation that you should read all of his posts. But I can’t go past this week’s microbiome story about comparing gut bacteria from people in different countries because:

b) Ed gives a super lucid and thorough explanation of this particular research

c) They compared gut bacteria from people in different countries!

“Just like the Americans, carnivore microbiomes are also packed with protein-busting genes, while herbivore microbiomes are rich in the starch-breaking genes that are common in Malawaians and Venezuelans guts.”